Ex-FACS worker lifts lid on conditions

A former child protection worker says working conditions in Alice Springs are getting worse despite an internal review and a coronial inquest into the 2005 death of a baby.

The Northern Territory Coroner heard evidence that the Alice Springs office of Families and Children Services [FACS] had "considerable problems", including poor standards and delays in case handling.

Child protection worker Angela Barry worked for FACS over several periods between 1997 and last year.

She says she was distressed to find conditions at the Alice Springs office had severely deteriorated when she returned to work there in 2008.

"What I saw was a ship that had already sunk," she said.

"There was no functioning remote team at all and the urban team were so far out of their depth that you could almost say that the workers there were traumatised with what they were having to deal with."

"There were notifications piled up as well, hundreds of them literally, so workers obviously were just trying to do what they could and were completely and utterly snowed under.

"And that can only lead to trauma in workers to be under those sort of conditions."

She says the Territory Government needs to try harder to employ local and Aboriginal staff.

"People are trying their hardest and I don't want to put down the efforts of the workers who have stayed there and who are trying in these difficult circumstances," she said.

"But I really think that a lot of the practice is substandard and that particularly Aboriginal families are not getting a good deal."

The Territory's Acting Health Minister, Rob Knight, and the chief executive of the Department of Health and Families, David Ashbridge, say there have been improvements to the child protection system.

They say more improvements will be made after the findings of an inquiry into child protection services are handed down later this year.